MichaelCD - The Blog.

The thoughts of Michael Cadwallader. Coffee loving, history book reading, Cheshire man.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Dear Ministers...

Thank you for listening to my worries about road pricing.......and then deciding to totally ignore them. That's good old Representative Democracy I suppose.

And hey, it's not like fitting cars with an electronic tag which monitors every mile travelled is detrimental to civil liberties. No siree. Providing accurate figures about immigration, however, well that's just being the living emobodiment of Big Brother!

Saturday, May 19, 2007

MPs' Day of Shame

Ian Dale has a list of the MPs who voted for the 'opt-out' to the Freedom of Information Act. Most of them were Labour MPs, some of them even government Ministers. That is quite amazing considering that the Labour government stated a couple of years ago:

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 reflects a national policy shift in public administration from a culture of confidentiality to a one of openness.The Act allows anyone the right of access generally to all types of recorded information held by a public authority, subject to certain limited exemption. The right of access to information is far wider than that currently enjoyed under any Code of Openness.

But, hey, as soon as their own expenses were opened-up to the lumpenproletariat, they've suddenly lost interest in 'a culture of openess'.

The source of the bill was the Conservative Party's David Maclean. He is quoted in the Daily Mail - and this is not a joke - as saying:

Mr Maclean claims the move would prevent correspondance from falling into the hands of "criminals or the BNP".

Ahh yes, the nasty, bogeyman BNP once again. If you have no idea how to dfend your scandalous attempts to deny the public information on your overblown expense claims, bring up 'racists'. I wonder, Mr Maclean, how exactly will the BNP use the FOI act? And, in what way would their usage of the act be construed as being 'wrong'? Perhaps Mr Maclean could furnish us proles with an explanation, but given his lack of love for openess, I'm not holding my breath.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

The Earth's Plentiful (?) Bounty

I'm not a fan of the crass headline, but I am pleased to see that the Daily Mail is interested in tackling the subject of oil reserve depletion:

According to David Strahan, a respected business journalist and author of the new book, the early warnings of an oil crisis were correct in every respect, save their timing.

In the next couple of decades or so, he argues, our civilisation will have crossed a point where the peak of oil discovery and production has been reached.

From then on, the story will be of dwindling supplies and rising prices.

Is he right? Well, he marshals some impressive arguments. The rate at which we discover oil has indeed been falling for 40 years.

In the Sixties, geologists found some 55 billion barrels a year. Today, the figure is down to just 9 billion barrels.

Most worryingly, we now consume three barrels for every new one discovered, and out of the 98 oilproducing nations, 60 (including the UK) are now in terminal decline.

Tax revenues here are dropping as North Sea oil production declines.

Indeed, Britain will become a permanent net importer of oil next year - according to The Oil Depletion Analysis Centre - and then our balance of payments and energy security will begin to deteriorate.

Strahan says: "It's the end of a gravy train for Britain."

Indeed. Our trade deficit is already dire and we haven't begun to the feel the pinch of being a net oil importer.

Let's remember that although it is difficult to fix a peak in the production of oil, - Strahan has predicited 2020 by the way - it doesn't change the basic fact that easy oil just isn't being discovered anymore. Tar sands may be numerous, but are far more difficult and expensive to extract than sweet light crude. And then there is demand, which shows no sign of abating. This all points towards oil trending higher and higher, at the very moment Britain is becoming a net oil importer.

So, all in all, I'm thinking Tony got his timing just right. As for you Gordon...oh dear.

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Something I Missed

I am not sure how I missed this from a couple of weeks ago. At least it gives me the opportunity to re-state:

The only pillar of the nation state which has not yet been attacked by multiculturalism, is the law. Well, so I thought. Then I came across an article on the BBC website, it turns out that the laws of this land, rooted in anglo-saxon common law, are not accepted by some British citizens.

This path in which we are sleepwalking down, is the one which leads us all the way upto the end of our nation as a united whole.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Britannia Fragmented

This week’s elections north of the Border may be one of the most important in the history of this island.If, and it is by no means certain, the Labour hegemony of Scotland is over, the SNP stand to take control of Holyrood.It is widely believed that the consequence of this victory will be that the Scottish people will get a chance to vote on independence, thus leading to the break-up of this nation, Great Britain.

What is surprising about these turn of events is not that the SNP, under the wily but slippery Alex Salmond, are set for victory, but that there is so little interest south of the border.Worse still, the only people who are interested are ones who are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of a divorce between England and Scotland. And, even more dismayingly, many of these people are within the conservative and right-wing movement; spending their time berating the Conservative Party for still supporting the union, when its break-up would deal a massive blow to Labour's chances of gaining power again.

Well, there are a lot of things I'd berate the Cameron Conservatives about, but a policy where they are attempting to conserve this nation state is certainly not one of them! They recognise, as all to few of us seem to, that defending the nation as it is - a whole greater than the sum of its country parts - is of the utmost importance.It transcends debates about North Sea Oil revenues; it transcends debates about what constituency Gordon Brown will represent; it transcends petty political point-scoring; and it involves the very soul of our nation.

Hopefully after Thursday, more people will come to realise that. Let's just hope it will not be too late.

Iran

Of course, Iran is not a proper free country and you can get into serious trouble if you oppose its regime. But that regime is weakening, not least because it is failing to deliver prosperity and jobs to the young. Its grip on their loyalty weakens by the day. A war with us would give it back its legitimacy, just as the attack by Saddam Hussein did in the 1980s.